Imgur geo-blocked the UK, so I geo-unblocked my network
blog.tymscar.com272 points by tymscar 8 hours ago
272 points by tymscar 8 hours ago
> Second, even if I installed a VPN on my main machine, what about my phone? My laptop? My desktop? Every device would need the VPN running, and I’d have to remember to connect it before browsing. It’s messy.
This is what routers are for. My router (a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux) is the only thing on my network that knows there's a VPN. I can selectively route whatever I want through it, including having a separate SSID/VLAN from which everything is routed through the VPN. It's wireguard based so there's no "installing a VPN", just an interface/network configured in systemd-networkd (once, on the router).
Edit: Routing by domain name could be tricky, though. I haven't had a need for that, and a proxy with local DNS override (as in the article) might needed if it came to that. I'd still do it on the router, though.
You can just use FoxyProxy instead of a separate browser instance. This firefox addon will use a proxy based on URL patterns.
my solution to this is to have centralised VPN splitter (x-ray/singbox) sitting on RPi, with tailscale attached to it. This makes it available from anywhere if the device is on TS network. With added benefit of rule based geo splitting to various zones.
> a cheap fanless box with several network ports running linux
Do you remember the name of the product?
I like protectli boxes. x86, low power, coreboot options, lots of network interfaces. The apus everyone recommends (myself included) are no longer available :(
Two devices I use - both running Debian, and both being open-source hardware to some degree or other:
PC Engines APU2, AMD x86_64, 4-core, 4GiB, 3x Gigabit Ethernet, 3 x mini PCIe, SIM slot, USB 3, Serial, SATA ports. Mine has dual band WiFi in one mPCIe, SSD in another.
Turris Mox, Marvel aarch64. This can expand via plug and go via a range of extension modules. I've got one with 25 Gigabit (3 x 8-port modules) Ethernet, 1 x SFP, 5 x USB3, Wifi, Serial.
Just a heads up that PC Engines is winding down. The chip they use in the APU2 is EOL, and they've decided to shut down altogether.
Wildly ironic that an EU company doesn't ship to the EU.
Regulatory compliance shouldn't be hard. The idea is to quell negative externalities, not to shut off innovation itself.
> Because of unbelievably bureaucratic recycling regulations, PC Engines will NOT sell directly to end users within the EU.
https://pcengines.ch/order.htm
> EU - a single market ?
> Far from it, there are separate registration and recycling schemes for each of the 28+ EU member jurisdictions (and even a few of their provinces). What part of COMMON MARKET was so hard to understand for EU lawmakers ? Since there is no single registration available, and separate registration would involve mindboggling complexity, bureaucracy and costs, we do not sell to EU end users until the EU gets their act together. Please order from EU based distributors, or as a business customer.
> Business customers are expected to meet their obligations by registering in the EU countries they sell in.
> Wildly ironic that an EU company doesn't ship to the EU.
Switzerland is not part of the EU in this timeline... But their rant sounds very much like an excuse, the WEEE is in effect at least since 2021:
"All EU Member States are required to adopt the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive 2012/19/EU, which sets rules for the collection, treatment, and recycling of electronic waste. However, some countries were granted an extension until August 2021 to meet the collection targets due to infrastructure limitations, including Bulgaria, Czechia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia" - courtesy Google AI overview
And in the end, 90% of people will throw it in the trash with everything else. I'm actually in the other 10%, but I live in the middle of a big city where I have electronic waste container like 300m away.
Btw, that's an awful website. I like simple minimalistic websites, but some people confuse "simple" with "give literally 0 fucks about the reader" and then I have 50-word long lines to read on my 32" monitor. Just put something like {max-width: 1200px; margin: 0 auto;} on the body at least.
Being based in Switzerland, which is not a member state, PC Engines is not an EU company.
Qotom is a good chinesium brand for small cheap fanless multi-NIC PCs: https://qotom.net
Imgur is one of the more annoying UK geoblocks because they persist it with cookies, so if you want to view something you can’t just switch to VPN for a second without also changing browser sessions.
Reddit is worse… you can’t even view someone’s profile if they’ve ever submitted a post labeled NSFW.
I was hoping, from the title ("Geo-Unblocked") that this would be about arranging an IP address block that wasn't associated with the UK, rather than just selectively running some traffic through a VPN.
If you're your own ISP you can be wherever you want to be
Sometimes. You can publish whatever geolocation data file you want, but others aren't required to respect that file. It's known that geolocation providers run pings and traceroutes from different locations as well as looking at BGP data.
I guess maybe we should start some kind of initiative to detect these geolocation providers so we can blacklist them. Maybe it can be some kind of database that is used to null-route all traffic coming from their network /s
I don't think that would work though. If you changed your WAN address it wouldn't be dissimilar from changing your IP to a different schema on a machine in a given network, no? It just wouldn't work at all.
"Is this overkill for viewing the occasional Imgur image? Probably."
From the last couple of weeks of researching some stuff, it makes perfect sense - I keep stumbling across blogs and documentation that uses Imgur, and it's really quite annoying that I can't see the screenshot or image that is being referenced. It hasn't /quite/ hit the point to put something in place, but this is super helpful for the final straw - when it comes!
It's been eye-opening how far-reaching Imgur really is - for example, some of the images on the Core Devices (the new Pebble folks) website are actually on Imgur.
This simple block is relatively trivial to bypass - but if they disappear tomorrow, a lot of things break.
> but if they disappear tomorrow, a lot of things break.
Tale as old as time, long-running forums are graveyards of dead Photobucket, Tinypic and Imageshack embeds. Imgur has lasted longer than most but the cycle will probably repeat eventually, especially since they were acquired by faceless corpos a few years ago.
I've said before that the age of an internet user can be estimated by how many free image hosting services they have seen come and go, like rings on a tree trunk.
A service shutting down, or being replaced is very different to one being blocked at a country level because of waves hands things
> waves hands things
government censorship
called it for what it is
The Online Safety Act is clear-cut censorship but that's not why Imgur left the UK. They were facing fines for violating the UKs data protection laws, specifically a set of rules that were introduced years before the OSA was even passed. Their parent company hasn't pulled any of their other services from the UK either, which you'd expect them to do if their goal was to protest or avoid the OSA.
makes me thankful for imgur deleting anonymous uploads a year or 2 ago
that made multiple forums I've been on rush to download everything to their servers
I've found it a bit harder than I thought to bypass but veepn free with the location set to Singapore kind of works, if slowly.
it will certainly not stop at Imgur
also, if foreign servers notice no real loss of traffic because people just circumvent draconian censorship measures from authoritarian regimes, then they can more safely ignore them without real repercussions
the EU seems to be following soon, so it's important that people have readily available tools so the power dynamics change and it doesn't become economically unfeasible to refuse censorship pressures
That's a lot of steps for something that would be a simple route rule or mangle + mark routing on mikrotik.
The route rule would route out a VPN instead of the main route.
If the domain name resolves to many IPs you can keep an address list up to date using a simple script.
This can be done on UniFi using policy based routing too trivially if anyone wants to repeat this.
Instructions using the unifi mobile app as it’s what I have to hand:
1) download wireguard conf file from vpn provider. On mobile app settings -> vpn client -> add new -> wireguard. Upload the file and save it
2) settings -> policy engine -> policy based routes. New. Select what to route -> specific traffic. Source = all devices. destination = domain name. Here add any domains you like. Interface = add the vpn you added in step 1
The only downside is this doesn’t work if you have IPv6 enabled as UniFi Network still allows those to bypass the VPN.
I ended up making a long list of firewall rules to block specific sites IPv6 ranges, which worked until I hit cloudflare backed sites.
I’m really hoping UniFi start supporting IPv6 WireGuard soon.
> even if I installed a VPN on my main machine, what about my phone? My laptop? My desktop? Every device would need the VPN running, and I’d have to remember to connect it before browsing. It’s messy.
Is there a way to install a VPN such that requests to/from certain domains (e.g. imgur.com) are routed via the VPN and the rest of your traffic is via non-VPN?
This would solve the problem of constantly having to dis/re connect VPN, and do it in an automatic fashion (i.e. without the manual steps of first recognising there's an unavailable asset on the page, opening VPN app, switching it on etc).
Such a configuration would also be very useful in other situations, e.g:
- using social media in countries that require age-verification
- using apps that geoblock (e.g. spotify blocks my subscription every few days because it detects a change in country, but what it's really detecting is simply whether or not my VPN happens to be on/off)
- accessing sites which are blocked (e.g. Thailand blocks common UK news sites which have said unflattering things about Thai royalty).
That'd be "split tunnel/VPN" by domain name, and usually it's limited to HTTP/S requests (because the hostname comes with the petition header), but some vendors (like ZScaler) do tricks to apply it to different protocols.
For example, the equivalent in Tailscale would be an "App Connector":
https://tailscale.com/kb/1342/app-connectors-setup#add-a-cus...
This is all new to me, but seems odd (startup idea?) why there isn't a SaaS letting me accomplish this on iPhone in a few minutes. (a few youtube searches for 'how to split VPN' are hopelessly theoretical as opposed to practical)
E.g. I'd definitely pay $10/month for an app that lets me input domains and which country to re-route traffic through.
E.g. a handful of social media apps via US (my country has age verification), a handful of news sites via UK (some countries I travel to block them entirely), spotify via a single country (I don't care which one, so long as it's constant).
I currently use ProtonVPN iPhone and macOS apps but AFAIK it routes all traffic through a single country which requires opening the app and manually changing it each time you want traffic routed via a different country.
Extremely keen to hear any solutions people have used on their own devices.
I've done similar. But I just used PBR (policy based routing) on my OpenWRT router. Took about 15 minutes to set it up. You can pick which domains go through VPN. Works great.
I feel like I'd rather solve this with a proxy PAC file. I recently started using this on airplane Wi-Fi where they'd block VPNs, but strangely not SSH. Dynamic forwarding with a good PAC to "direct" connect the onboard entertainment and flight tracking hosts/URLs works great!
they block VPNs too, if yours is working it's just a matter of time until they get to it. Avoid using imgur entirely. What I find insidious is that unlike reddit and some other sites, they won't tell you it's blocked, they'll give you this:
{"data":{"error":"Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later."},"success":false,"status":403}
Even if they give you this error if you load and image directly, it will often still work if hotlinked in a web page.
> First, I just upgraded to 2.5 Gbps internet and I don’t want to route all my traffic through a VPN and take the speed hit. I have this bandwidth for a reason
You don't have to. You create a container which runs openvpn to connect to your vpn provider, and also hosts an ssh daemon. The ssh daemon receives incoming SOCKS5 connections from a firefox portable browser, which has been configured to use the proxy (your Docker openvpn-container) for browsing and DNS resolution, and pipes it through the VPN tunnel.
So you have that one browser just to surf imgur. if that's your thing. And you could also use Firefox on Android (maybe also iOS) with those proxy settings (a secondary Firefox browser, like the beta version).
So you get very high control about what you are using the VPN for, you don't just pipe your entire OS's network traffic through the VPN.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...
You can default route domains through a VPN using a Firefox tab container, you don’t need a separate browser instance running!
You can use the official add-on for that https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account... On the surface the proxy option looks like it is only their own VPN service, but you can set up your own too.
This would have the exact problem mentioned immediately after the paragraph you quoted. Every computer, phone, etc. would need specific setup. The author is clear about their goal:
> I wanted something cleaner: a solution that works for every device on my network, automatically, without any client-side configuration.
That doesn't seem very practical. The issue is that imgur links are everywhere and you wouldn't want to switch browsers whenever you encounter one. Not to mention it requires per device setup. Author's solution is much better than what you describe.
This is a great idea except for me (and for the author I suspect) I regularly come across attachment of Imgur hosted images on sites (like a post on a DIY forum but not all of them) so it wouldn't solve my issue unless I were to use your browser in the container all the time (I suspect the author also doesn't just 'surf imgur' but randomly comes across images hosted on imgur linked to from other locations).
In that case FoxyProxy's proxy by URL pattern would be what you'd want to use.
Nope, security/privacy is always a trade off. It's much much safer just to route all your traffic through a VPN. I get ~200-500 Mbps with Mullvad, that seems good enough. Sucks if you upgraded to 2.5 Gbps before checking, but oh well
a-ha, if you happen to have a Unifi router then a simpler setup would be to do policy based routing by hostnames through a vpn client maintained in the router config
> The key detail is network_mode: "service:gluetun"
Such a clear giveaway that this was written by an AI
Nice work.
I've thought about doing something similar as well! It drives me nuts this ban, everywhere I look I see these blocked images. I thought about making a chrome extension that proxies.
If your VPN provider offers a socks5 instance you can do this entire thing with a socat oneliner + the dns hijack of course.
For some reason T-Mobile in the Bay Area can get randomly geoIPed to the UK so imgur just randomly breaks on my phone. Marvelous
Could this be built into open source routers? If you wanted to get fancy you could even select the best VPN for the particular service.
You can run the shadowsocks client on some routers and pass selected traffic via your external shadowsocks server.
I haven't needed to do this since I move to the US, but IIRC the rules were based on IP subnets.
The approach in TFA is more sophisticated and fine-grained.
gl.inet routers running OpenWRT do this easily in the newer firmware versions the last few months.
This is quite easy with OpenWRT.
Install the Wireguard packages, create a connection to your VPN of choice in a nearby country (I chose Sweden). Then I used the "vpn-policy-routing" package to route Imgur IPs (199.232.196.193 199.232.192.193) through the VPN.
Works for websites that keep nagging you for age verification too.
But seriously, it's been more emotional than I'd expected to get my cat memes back.
Yeah, doing it with OpenWRT and PBR is definately much simpler than this approach. However by using hard-coded IP addresses you are at risk of breakage if they change in the future.
Also fastly-hosted services are a bit awkard to configure IP ranges to cover whole blocks as they seem to not use normal CIDR-blocks for different customers.
But you use PBR's ntfset functionality to have your dns server automatically update a set whenever an DNS entry is resolved, then set the policy rules based on the set.
Didn't even know it was possible. But thanks to this comment - got the same setup via my Unifi router too. Thanks!
I wonder how did you overcome https. As I understand the request that goes to rerouted Imgur proxy will have different cert.
AIUI, nginx doesn't terminate the SSL/TLS connection - it is just passed through as is. `ssl_preread on` extracts the server name from the Server Name Indication (SNI) send as part of the TLS handshake, which is unencrypted.
I just set up a similar system (Debian LXC permanently connected to a VPN, nginx proxying imgur.com and all its subdomains with the rest being dropped), and it works quite well. Setting DNS records for imgur.com and {api,i,s}.imgur.com seems to be sufficient to get the site and inline images working (not 100% if all are needed - I haven't fully tested it yet).
Presumably TLS still only happens at the browser and at the Imgur origin server. Everything in between just routes the request without being able to read any of the encrypted stuff. This is no different than using your browser while your computer is connected to the web via a VPN, except that in this case only a small subset of requests go through the VPN.
So you are just a simple GB citizen and some external site blocked access by country affiliation?! Is there any practical reason for blocking access to that site by geotargeting?
The UK’s “online safety act” means a number of medium sized sites have decided it’s not worth doing business in the UK.
This is not why imgur have left though, they didn't want to comply with Data Protection laws.
The "online safety act" introduced mandatory age verification starting in July 2025.
The government announced "plans to fine Imgur after probing its approach to age checks and use of children's personal data" in September 2025 [1]
Are you telling me those were unrelated? How are you going to fine a website over age checks without the law that requires age checks?
Yes. The ICO investigation that resulted in Imgur blocking the UK pre-dates the Online Safety Act coming into force.
As others have mentioned, Ofcom is responsible for enforcement of the OSA - but the investigation against Imgur was carried out by the ICO.
Seeing as the investigation was by the ICO instead of OFCOM, yes, very much so. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
The governments of the countries that dabbling into the "think of the children" laws should build their own "safe" internets for their citizens, walling them in, requiring them to "verify their age" before letting them out of their cages into the Internet.
This is such a deep rabbit hole! Other alternatives include CDN and residential proxies, no VPN required
I've not managed to succesfully use a VPN to get around the geoblock. It seems that most of VPN exit nodes are also blocked (but in a different way)
Why not call it split tunneling, which is what it is.
because saying "i used a split tunnel to access geo-blocked resources" doesn't get you those sweet sweet internet points on hacker news, ofc
Interesting. I have nextdns.io and VPN proxy and a unifi router. Is this possible for me?
It works great till you leave your house.
Unless you vpn back to your house, but then again, now you are using double vpn!
There is currently no alternative to geo-blocking the UK if you don't want to get threatening legal letters from Ofcom that order you to break the laws of your country.
Another thing that you can do when you have the IP address range is just run a traditional split-tunnel. A simple way to do that is to run Wireguard on a cheap VPS, then have only traffic to those fixed IPs go to that tunnel. The nice thing about this is that tiny WiFi routers (e.g. hAP AX S) these days support Wireguard at pretty decent speeds. Then anyone on your network gets this, and if you want it while you roam you can just run the Wireguard VPN on your phone as well with the same rules.
What's annoying about this block is that Imgur detects Telegram's server for image previews as coming from the UK but they are in the Netherlands so when someone sends an imgur link through Telegram with the little preview attached you now only get the "not available" image as prevew...
Imgur doesn't even let me sign into my almost 10 year old account from many countries while traveling. Never seen this kind of wack shit anywhere else. The fuck's their problem?
Imagine having to install a vpn to browse the internet in a first world country.
Imagine deciding to pull out of a country because you refuse to comply with protecting the personal data of actual children.
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> ⌘+F, "vote", Not found
Seems the author forgot one step.
The law was drafted by the government of one party, enacted by the government of the other party.
And backed by popular support.
It’s another good example of internet sentiment being far different to popular sentiment.
Polling shows around 70% supported it, though far fewer thought it would be effective. Pretty much matches my views on it.
This little "solution" might be fine for .. imgur .. but it shows your nation is well into the authoritarian descent. And there's no where left in the western world to move to either ... It's not a slippery slope, it's a landslide.
Great work! Perhaps not the appropriate OSI layer, but would be cool if this could pull the imgur blob from the wayback machine if unavailable on imgur proper. You'd still need this networking setup, as archive.org is blocked as well in the UK per ground truth from others on HN.
> archive.org is blocked as well in the UK
it isn't
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45430848 is the thread where I learned of this. I'll have to do more research, thanks.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/internet-archive-...
I'm in the UK and we use 'mobile broadband' for our domestic Internet connection. So a mains powered router box that connects to the local G4 (or G5) mobile data network and provides wifi and a few cat 5 sockets. We don't need to subscribe to a phone line (e.g. last mile supplied by Openreach/BT or fibre from Virgin or whoever). I pay a single flat fee monthly by credit card. It is reasonably fast and meets our modest needs. There is no hard data cap. We average 150 Gb per quarter or so.
archive.org is blocked (along with other nsfw type sites), but as the last post in your link to an earlier discussion says, I could get it unblocked by filling in a declaration that I'm over 18. Paying by credit card isn't enough to unblock automatically for this particular package.
I've chosen not to unblock for no particular reason. The block sort of makes sense to me because archive.org records a lot of Web sites, some of which may have what is regarded as adult content, and it is unreasonable to expect archive.org to label individual records of sites according to the criteria the UK uses (each country probably has its own set of criteria e.g. gambling Web sites of certain kinds in the US).
archive.org is easily accessible in the UK from most wifi connections in cafes, libraries and, hilariously, colleges (where people under 18 gather in large numbers), and also from domestic adsl or fibre Internet connections.
> archive.org is blocked (along with other nsfw type sites), but as the last post in your link to an earlier discussion says, I could get it unblocked by filling in a declaration that I'm over 18. Paying by credit card isn't enough to unblock automatically for this particular package
That's something to do with your provider. Maybe you need a non-crappy provider.
You do not need to provide any kind of declaration that you're over 18 to access archive.org in the UK.
See comment from another UK resident further down. I suspect it depends on the contract you have, and quite possibly when the contract started.
It appears to be something to do with using PAYG SIMs for mobile broadband. Back when I lived ten minutes from one of the largest cities in the country I used 4G, but didn't run into this or their CGNAT crap because I tunneled out to a sane ISP.
Given that you can buy a SIM that'll give you a couple of hundred GB of data for under a tenner, it seems reasonable that they'd block stuff you didn't want young children getting access to (easily).
The op in the thread is wrong, it's not blocked.
Source: am British, on phone.
> as archive.org is blocked as well in the UK per ground truth from others on HN
I am in the UK.
archive.org is not blocked — not the Library or the Wayback Machine.
ETA: I just checked re: the comment toomuchtodo linked to, and it actually is blocked by default on my mobile phone as adult content, because I've never bothered to disable the adult content lock on that device. I get redirected to a page operated by my mobile network where I can undo the lock by giving them info; I might do that one day, might not.
For non-UK users: UK mobile phone providers all block adult content by default at the account level as a simple parental control measure, and have done for some time, largely because PAYG data is really rather cheap here.
Interesting but not particularly bothersome. Apparently this decision is about eleven years old.